No Safe Spaces

ACTION: READ THIS POEM BY FRED DODSWORTH

No Safe Spaces

Standing midst the flames
like wolves’ tongues
surrounded by shattered lives,
the sun sets in the East this time,
a dark orange pallor
casting its sickly shadow
over dreams once offered
it’s a republic, if you can keep it,
said an old white dead guy
while a child, incandescent like the stars,
burns through the night
her eyes the color of embers
an abyss beckoning to a future
too like the past,
another season turn, turn, turning,
Guernica, guerre, resistance …
is inevitable,
art is an act of war.

An ink-stained wretch, Fred Dodsworth spent most of the last 30 years in newsrooms picking fights. The truth is a slippery bastard and he lost most of those fights. Now he writes poetry and fiction because there’s more truth to be found in fiction than in any news story ever printed.